THE METAPHYSICS OF THE WILL

 Click here to listen to Prof Edward Feser

Dr Feser argues that metaphysical errors about the nature of the will have caused significant damage to moral theory and practice. The best way to clear up such errors is to take things back to first principles and work them forward again. In this Quarantine Lecture, Dr. Feser considers what a substance is in general and what the power of a substance is. The technical Aristotelian-Thomistic way of capturing the difference between a true physical substance and a mere aggregate or artefact, is to say that a physical substance has qua substance a substantial form, whereas an aggregate or an artefact has qua aggregate or artefact a merely accidental form

A power is a capacity to act or operate in a certain way. A power is a kind of attribute and exists only in a substance rather than in a free stranding way. Because powers have a kind of teleology, for an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysician, the notion of a causal power is closely related to the notions of formal and final causality. Aquinas tells us that every form has some inclination following upon it and every agent acts for the sake of an end.

A rational substance is a substance with an intellect; an intellect is precisely to have the capacity to conceptualize what one knows. We have then a hierarchy of degrees to which the source of a thing's behavior is within it. A rational substance such as a human being or an angel (as opposed to an inanimate, vegetative or non-human animal substance) has a perfect knowledge of the ends toward which its powers are directed insofar as the very essences of those ends are within it. It possesses a kind of causal power which we can classify as rational appetite.

To have a will is, for Aquinas, precisely to have a rational appetite, to have in the most perfect way possible the source of one's activity within. Having a will also entails immateriality and possessing forms abstracted from matter.

Dr Feser concludes by touching on Aquinas's treatment of the reality of free choice and the lack of changeability of the human will after death.

Dr. Feser argues that metaphysical errors about the nature of the will angeability of the hu